War Crime

The Israeli government is saying now that they want to change the rules of war.  They say this probably in response to the Goldstone report which may result in trials of government and military officials under the old rules of the Geneva Convention.  Our own president Bush did change the rules of war.  Oddly no one is talking about bringing officials of his administration before international courts.  Terrorists have changed the way war is waged.  They won’t be tried for their atrocities; they’re just killed or, as the Pakistani government says “eradicated.” It could be and once was said “exterminated.”

Oh yeah it could be argued that the numbers aren’t as great, that the intention isn’t as focused, that the means aren’t as methodical.  Then what we are doing is justifying just a little killing which isn’t just at all.  War is intentional, focused and just plain mean, with or without the rules of war.  It is premeditated intention:  bomb the hell out of them until they are all dead or until they have surrendered unwillingly until the next time.  And there always is a next time, another war, another killing spree.

There is no other animal that does this, not one.  Do the bears of the Rockies go to war against the bears in the Sierras; uh no.  The only other species I know of that has wars are ants.  So we, the lords of the animals, turn out to be no better than bugs.  We’re just another bunch of ants swarming in a furious melee, covering a sidewalk or a country with dead and/or mutilated bodies.

There is little evidence that much of anything is being done to change going to war at all. 

War is a failure of the rule of law; under any other circumstances the taking of human life is considered the crime of murder.  War is a crime.  War is a failure of law.  The criminals are found on all sides usually among those in authority who perpetrate, exaggerate, perpetuate the violence in lives, language and legions.

We don’t suddenly just go crazy and have our nasty wars because someone took out 3000 people in cruelly spectacular fashion.   There is method to this madness.  We go to war because some demagogue that the federal government put into place decided to be ungrateful at some point; he thought he had enough of our weapons to turn on us.  We go to war because some central Asian peasants nearly melted probably billions of dollars of gold in the basement of too tall towers.  We go to war because there is need for an oil pipeline that can’t be built in a country of people that isn’t open to being exploited; a country of people that could care less about being western civilized.

It would be easy to say that war is between them and them while us stay at home and choose sides like some team sport spectacle. We live in a society in which words like “killer” and “bomb” are accepted as accolades.  We live in a society that promotes violence, allows its citizens to carry guns, allows police forces to carry guns,. We live in a society that produces films like “There Will Be Blood”, that thinks that Quentin Tarantino films are cleverly unusual.  We live in a society that gives rise to new expressions like the aestheticization of violence.

When I was a kid, I had toy guns in the days when the toys looked like the real thing.  These toys were often passed off as real guns for purposes of store robberies.  So now the guns are orange and such colors so as not to be confused with the real guns; they are still guns.  There are a plethora of video and arcade games whose only theme is murder and mayhem.  It is often said that these games prepare youth to be in the military operating drones in this country while bombing people to death in a country thousands of miles away.

What happened to pinball machines in arcades which aren’t designed for any kind of killing.  When will we "study war no more" and eradicate this violence among people.  Enough.